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Pablo Picasso: Picasso's Early Life
Pablo Picasso: Picasso's Early Life
Pablo Picasso is probably the most important figure of the 20th century, in terms of art, and art
movements that occurred over this period. Before the age of 50, the Spanish born artist had become the
most well-known name in modern art, with the most distinct style and eye for artistic creation. There
had been no other artists, prior to Picasso, who had such an impact on the art world, or had a mass
following of fans and critics alike, as he did.
Pablo Picasso was born in Spain in 1881, and was raised there before going on to spend most of his adult
life working as an artist in France. Throughout the long course of his career, he created more than
20,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and other items such as costumes and theater sets. He
is universally renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the twentieth century.
Picasso's ability to produce works in an astonishing range of styles made him well respected during his
own lifetime. After his death in 1973 his value as an artist and inspiration to other artists has only grown.
He is without a doubt destined to permanently etch himself into the fabric of humanity as one of the
greatest artists of all time.
As an artist and an innovator, he is responsible for co-founding the entire Cubist movement
alongside Georges Braque. Cubism was an avant-garde art movement that changed forever the face of
European painting and sculpture while simultaneously affecting contemporary architecture, music and
literature. Subjects and objects in Cubism are broken up into pieces and re-arranged in an abstract form.
During the period from approximately 1910-1920 when Picasso and Braque were laying the foundation
for Cubism in France, its effects were so far-reaching as to inspire offshoots like the styles of Futurism,
Dada, and Constructivism in other countries.
Picasso is also credited with inventing constructed sculpture and co-inventing the collage art style. He is
also regarded as one of three artists in the twentieth century credited with defining the elements of
plastic arts. This revolutionary art form led society toward societal advances in painting, sculpture,
printmaking and ceramics by physically manipulating materials that had not previously been carved or
shaped. These materials were not just plastic, they were things that could be molded in some way,
usually into three dimensions. Artists used clay, plaster, precious metals, and wood to create
revolutionary sculptural artwork the world had never seen before.
In 1891 at ten years old, the family moved to A Coruna where School of Fine Arts hired Ruiz to be a
professor. They spent four years there where Ruiz felt his son surpassed him as an artist at the age of 13
and reportedly vowed to give up painting. Though paintings by Ruiz still seem to have been generated
years later, Picasso's father certainly felt humbled by his son's natural skill and technique.
Picasso and his family were horrified when his seven-year-old sister died of diphtheria in 1895. They
relocated to Barcelona and Ruiz began working at its School of Fine Arts. He persuaded officials there to
let his son take an entrance exam for an advanced class and Picasso was admitted at the age of just 13.
At the age of 16 he was sent to Spain's foremost art school in Madrid, the Royal Academy of San
Fernando. Picasso disliked the formal instructions and decided to stop attending his classes soon after
he arrived. He filled his days inside Madrid's Prado, which displayed paintings such as Francisco
Goya and El Greco.
The body of work Picasso created throughout his lifetime is enormous and spans from his early
childhood years until his death, creating a more comprehensive record of his development than perhaps
any other artist. When examining the records of his early work there is said to be a shift where the child-
like quality of his drawings vanished, therefore being the official beginning of his career. That date is said
to be 1894, when Picasso was just 13. At the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Peps, a striking
depiction that has been referred to as one of the best portraits in Spanish history. And at age 16, Picasso
created his award-winning Science and Charity.
His technique for realism, so ingrained by his father and his childhood studies, evolved with his
introduction to symbolist influences. It led Picasso to develop his own take on modernism, and then to
make his first trip to Paris, France. The poet Max Jacob, a Parisian friend, taught Picasso French. They
shared an apartment where they experienced the true meaning of what it meant to be a "starving
artist." They were cold and in poverty, burning their own work to keep the apartment warm.
Picasso would predominately spend his working adult life in France. His work has been divided roughly
by periods of time in which he would fully develop complex themes and feelings to create a unifying
body of work.
American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein became great fans of Picasso. They not only became his
chief patrons, Gertrude was also pictured in his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, one of his most famous
portraits.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was Picasso's first masterpiece. The painting depicts five naked women
with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African
masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely
pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly
upturned tabletop. In this painting, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European
painting by adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-
dimensional picture plane.
When Les Demoiselles d'Avignon first appeared, it was as if the art world had collapsed. Known form and
representation were completely abandoned. Hence it was called the most innovative painting in modern
art history. With the new strategies applied in the painting, Picasso suddenly found freedom of
expression away from current and classical French influences and was able to carve his own path.
Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."
- Pablo Picasso
Cubism (1909-1919)
It was a confluence of influences - from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau, to archaic and tribal art -
that encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more weight and structure around 1907. And they ultimately
set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had
dominated Renaissance art. During this period, the styles Georges Braque and Picasso developed used
mainly neutral colors and was based in there "taking apart" objects and "analyzing them" in terms of
their shapes. Cubism, especially the second form, known as Synthetic Cubism, played a great role in the
development of western art world. Works of this phase emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of
forms in the picture. Color is extremely important in the objects' shapes because they become larger
and more decorative. Non-painted objects such as newspapers or tobacco wrappers are frequently
pasted on the canvas in combination with painted areas - the incorporation of a wide variety of
extraneous materials is particularly associated with Picasso's novel technique of collage. This collage
technique emphasizes the differences in texture and poses the question of what is reality and what is
illusion in painting. With his use of color, shape and geometrical figures, and his unique approach to
depict images, Picasso changed the direction of art for generations to come.
Final Years
Picasso's final works were a mixed between the many styles he'd embraced throughout his life. He
dared to make sculptures larger and his paintings more expressive and colorful. Towards the end of his
career, Picasso enjoyed examining Classical works that had influenced his development over the years,
and produced several series of variations of paintings of Old Master, including Rembrandt, Diego
Velazquez, and Eduard Manet, the founder of modern traditions. Some of the most notable works he
did include Massacre in Korea after Goya, Las Meninas after Velazquez, and Luncheon on the
Grass after Manet. Many of these pieces are still influential in the art world today; and, in fact, due to
the vision and distinct creative style, are still among some of the most innovative pieces which have
been introduced to the art world, even during recent years. A multitude of paintings Picasso painted
during his final years are now widely accepted as the beginning of the Neo-Expressionism movement.